If..Else Log

Dave Seah¹ tries his best to convince people that he did not write the Zen of CSS Design.

My name is…

I especially empathise with the section on surname pronounciation. My surname is Chinese and, as with Dave, through the process of roman transliteration, some linguistic information has been lost along the way as you try to do a 'best fit'. In the case of my surname, Ly, it's pronounced with an e' sound i.e. closer to 'Lee' than 'Lie'. The reason it has been spelt that way is because with Chinese, small intonations result in different words². Hence, Ly was the best judged match which would also allow some differentiation from Le, Li and Lee etc…

I'm generally quite pragmatic and I've accepted that people will read it as 'Lie'; sometimes, in the interest of getting things done, I pronounce it as such over the phone just so as to speed things up. However, you'll earn yourself gratitude points if you get the pronounciation right:)

In addition, my first name, Phu, is pronounced Foo³. Fortunately, most people get this right but I've been called Poo and Pe'Hoo before in the past.

A slight digression

There's an episode on Friends where one of the guys that Chandler works with, calls him by a different name. Chandler doesn't correct him as it wasn't worth the hassle especially as they don't work together. However, when the guy applies for a position on his floor, problems begin…

I actually had a similar thing happen to me in Uni. There was a guy who would think that my first name was Lee⁴. The only times we'd meet were really just the occasional bumping into each other in the corridor so I didn't bother raising the issue. However, we ended up having a class together which made things a bit more awkward. Somehow, I managed to make it through the whole semester without anyone the wiser… I'm awful, I know.

1. Note the surname [back]
2. analagous to the homonyms that exist in English language such as accept and except [back]
3. Notice the programming parallel. I was born to be a geek:) [back]
4. Ironically, in Chinese, you'd name a person in the following manner: Family name, Generational Name, Forename instead of the western convention of Forename, Middle Name, Family Name. So I'd be Ly Phu Cuong (Yes, Cuong is actually my forename in Chinese; it's all a bit of muddle:-)). [back]

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